Rose seemed to have worked out a plan with Mrs. Roth, without having notified the girls. She gave the woman a nod as she finished and Mrs. Roth slowly made her way to the front of the room, propelling her tiny frame forward with great difficulty, like a character in a dream who finds the air around her suddenly turned to Jell-O or chocolate pudding. Was she drugged? Sadie wondered. Probably. Her black suit was a near replica of Rose Peregrine’s navy one and Sadie, for a moment, wondered if her mother had taken Mrs. Roth to Bergdorf’s on Saturday. On either side of Sadie, Beth and Emily emitted small sounds of distress. “I want to thank you all,” Mrs. Roth said, her voice thick and low. “You loved her. And she loved all of you. I’ve never seen a girl who loved her friends so much.” And then she collapsed, sobbing. “Oh God,” Beth whispered. “Oh God.” And Sadie jumped up and embraced the woman. Together, she and Rose guided her downstairs, sat her at a table with a glass of white wine and a bagel, and held her thin hands together, in silence. “I wanted to have another,” she told them finally. “But we couldn’t.” With a shudder, she dropped her wet face into her hands. “Yes,” murmured Rose, inexplicably, rubbing the woman’s thin back. From the hallway, Sadie heard the faint sounds of footsteps, the low thrum of voices.
“We’d like you to come,” Mrs. Roth said finally. “To the funeral. Please. All of you. I don’t know what Barry was thinking.”
“Oh,” said Sadie, feeling herself on the verge of tears. “Thank you.” She swallowed the wetness that had gathered in her throat. “We loved her.”
“Barry’s ordered cars,” said Mrs. Roth, pulling a compact out of her bag and staring at it uncomprehendingly. “There’s room.”
“Okay,” said Rose. “Let’s have a little drink now.”
A moment later, they were invaded. All around them, people talked and, strangely, laughed in little groups, their hands obscured by bagels striped pink by salmon. Dave stood with Meredith Weiss and her husband, the two men making movements with their hands, as if playing a guitar. The husbands—Ed, Josh, and Will—sat together at a small table drinking what appeared to be—but could not be, since Sadie and Rose had not provided it—scotch, the Slikowskers gathered around them like groupies. At a large table, the Roths talked loudly with each other, while Sadie’s parents nodded and sipped glasses of white wine. At another, Dave’s parents flipped through a yellowing Hebrew songbook, singing snatches of tunes Sadie remembered from camp. Curtis Lang and his bunch positioned themselves by the bar—of course, Sadie thought—as did the band guys from the wedding and their respective spouses, and Rob Green-Gold and his girl. The bartender they’d hired to pour wine and Calistoga water, a tall kid with spiky hair, appeared a bit stagestruck.
Beth and Emily stood, in silence, by the tray of bagels, scanning the crowd. Eventually, Sadie left Elaine Roth in the care of her husband and made her way over to them. “I was just going to talk to George Wadsworth,” said Beth.
“Okay,” said Sadie, through what felt like a layer of cotton wool. It was hot in the room, way too hot, and her breasts, she was realizing too late, were quickly becoming engorged, hard as rocks and painful at the tips. This was the longest she’d left Mina, more than four hours, and she had, she calculated, missed two feedings, before and after Mina’s morning nap. She’d brought her hand pump in her bag. Or—oh no—she hadn’t. Had she? She’d left it out—she could see on the kitchen table, freshly sterilized, in a Ziploc bag—but had she actually grabbed it on the way out? “I’m going to go wash my face,” she told Emily. “Will you be okay?”
“Sure,” said Emily. Sadie could tell she didn’t want to be abandoned, but she slid off anyway, past clusters of Roths in animated discussion, to the little cabinet in the north corner, in which she’d stashed her bag. The room, she thought, was growing hotter and hotter. Why had she worn wool, wool that was now stretching uncomfortably over her breasts? Hadn’t she attended a thousand oversubscribed luncheons in this very room, with its nonfunctioning windows? “Excuse me,” she said to a man’s gray flannel back. But instead of allowing her to pass, he turned and handed her a glass of wine. Tuck. “Sadie Peregrine,” he said. “I was just coming to find you. Thought you might need a drink.”
“Oh,” said Sadie, dumbly. Her breasts, now, were pricking. In a moment, she knew, she’d begin to leak. She had not—what was wrong with her?—worn pads. They’d ruined the line of her dress.
“I loved what you said about Lil,” said Tuck, his voice ragged and cracking. “You planned all this? You and your mother?”
Sadie compressed her lips into a thin line, an expression her mother had told her, time and again, was unattractive. “Actually, we all planned it together,” she told him truthfully.
“Oh, right,” he replied, nodding his broad head. “The group.” He took a long sip of wine and raised his eyebrows at her. He hadn’t, she saw, even bothered to shave.
“We tried to figure out what Lil would have wanted,” she added, feeling herself somehow—why? why?—becoming the person he thought her to be: girlish, silly, false. She gulped down her wine, as if it were water, for she was thirsty, suddenly, unbearably thirsty.
“That’s really nice of you,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said, then stopped and closed her eyes. Why would he not go away? What was she sorry for? He looked at her, guilelessly, for the first time in—how long? Years? Ever? It had been at least a year since she’d last seen him, probably more, and the lines that ran from his nose to the corners of his mouth had deepened, exaggerating the hard slant of his cheekbones, and lending his face a peculiar plasticity, as if he were not human but a marionette. His mouth went slack, in expectation of kindness, and Sadie found herself reaching up and embracing him. For a moment, he stiffened and then, with a small sob, he wrapped his arms around her and dropped his head to the top of hers. He was hot, too, and he smelled of sweat and tobacco and alcohol, though not unpleasantly so, and she wanted to tell him it was okay, everything was all right, it wasn’t his fault, none of this was his fault, and if it was his fault, then it was hers, too, for she could have fought harder for him, for his book, though that wasn’t really the point, the point was that she had abandoned Lil, too—so wonderful, but so exhausting, and Sadie had grown so tired, had felt that she didn’t have time for difficulty anymore, not once Jack came, and the world changed, and she was so depleted and afraid—and they were two of a kind, in a way, weren’t they, now? And she was sorry, she was, she was so sorry. But before she could say a word, there it was, yes, the hot, prickling spurt of milk, soaking the slick fabric of her bra and the rougher one of her dress—hopefully not Tuck’s suit—and cooling immediately, a sensation she loathed. She pulled away from his embrace and folded her arms across her chest to hide the stains. “I’m afraid,” she said hoarsely, “I have to make my way to the ladies’ room.” He looked directly, disconcertingly, into her eyes, as if daring her to leave. What was it? What did he want from her? She could not say what he perhaps wanted her to say. A moment ago, in his arms, she had thought she could absolve him. But now her empathy had disappeared. Her mind had gone blank. “I—” she said. “I was wondering, do you have the time?” Still, he stared at her, his face strangely immobile, and she thought that he might kiss her, for he looked, rather literally, like a drowning man, battered by waves and wind, scouting for a lifeboat. He held up his wrist to her. “Thanks,” she said. “If you’ll excuse me,” and she turned on her heel and galloped up the stairs, sloshing wine out of her plastic cup with each step, soothed by the efficient click of her heels on the stone steps, a sound she’d relished in childhood, when she’d sat in the synagogue’s coatroom reading novels, the edges of minks and sables tickling her arms, listening to the distant voices and music from the bar mitzvahs or weddings or fund-raisers at which her parents danced.